Fact check: Suicide statistics explained

This fact check comes from Full Fact, the UK’s largest fact checking charity working to find, expose and counter the harms of bad information.

Late last month the Office for National Statistics (ONS) released new data on suicides in England and Wales for 2023. It showed what the ONS called “the highest rate seen since 1999”.

This stark news was sadly true, but it’s also easily misunderstood. Various claims we saw after the data was published suggested the data meant there were 6,069 suicides in England and Wales in 2023, or that the rate at which people killed themselves in England and Wales had reached the highest level in more than two decades.

Neither of these statements were really correct, because the suicide “rate” here means the rate at which suicides are being registered, not the rate at which they’re happening.

This matters because there is often a delay of months or even years between a death occurring and its subsequent registration as a suicide by a coroner. Of the 6,069 suicide registrations in 2023, only 39% concerned deaths that happened in that year.

So the rise in registrations in 2023 might mean there’s been a rise in the number of suicides. Or it might mean that coroners’ courts have been catching up with a large number of older cases. Or both.

The ONS does publish suicide data by date of occurrence, but it can take years for the trend to emerge, as past deaths are added retrospectively.

Looking just at the crude numbers available now, you could equally say that the rate (of suicide registrations) rose sharply in 2023 to a long-term high, or that the rate (of suicide occurrences) has fallen for the last three years in a row, to 2022 (although the totals in recent years will rise in future).

Over the longer term, the number of suicides per 100,000 people (both registrations and occurrences) fell in the 1980s and 1990s, before seeming to flatten in the late 2000s, then appearing—at least on paper—to rise slightly from the late 2010s. But a change in the rules in July 2018 makes it difficult to reliably compare the numbers on either side.

Before that date, coroners were expected to register a death as a suicide if the evidence showed that’s what it was “beyond all reasonable doubt”. Afterwards, the evidence only had to show that a death was a suicide “on the balance of probabilities”.

This was expected to raise the proportion of deaths registered as suicides, and ONS data does show a substantial rise in 2018. But this began in the months before July 2018, and the ONS says the reasons behind it are hard to be sure about.

The chair of the National Suicide Prevention Strategy Advisory Group, Professor Louis Appleby, told us: “When suicide rates change, we should start by asking: did anything change about the data? As Full Fact show, how and when we record suicide can influence national rates. Yet one thing never changes—any suicide rate is too high.”

If you are struggling to cope, please call Samaritans for free on 116 123. Other sources of support are listed on the NHS help for suicidal thoughts webpage. Support is available around the clock, every day of the year.